As the development of techniques for the use of electric home appliances and office equipment has progressed, these terminal devices have tended to become multi-functional and complex. Therefore, when the only references available are the operating manuals manufacturers usually provide, understanding these complicated terminal devices is a demanding task and ordinary users find them difficult to operate. As a result, the number of inquiries received by customer support centers is growing rapidly, and an overwhelming load, including the employment of additional workers for their customer support centers, has been imposed on the companies that produce the terminal devices.
In addition to the increase in the number of inquiries, another problem has arisen in that it is very difficult to use written or oral explanations to describe the locations and the manipulation of operating buttons and operating slides on terminal devices, such as electric home appliances. Even when the electric home appliances are those that are commonly used, it is very difficult to explain to users from remote areas, by phone, the manipulation of specific pieces. Accordingly, the time required to respond to individual inquiries has been extended, and this has imposed an immense load on customer service centers.
Furthermore, inquiries received from users involve not only simple part manipulations, but also operating problems, such as the malfunctioning of terminal devices. In such cases, customer support centers must specifically identify malfunctioning parts, and must, therefore, quiz users to determine how they used the terminal devices in the past, as well as ask the users to precisely describe the current condition of their malfunctioning unit. However, if the users are not fully familiar with the terminal devices, it is difficult for the persons in charge at the customer support centers to ascertain what actions were taken by the users in the past and to evaluate the problems that the users are presently having. Furthermore, since the users may not fully understand the technical terms used by the persons in charge at the customer support centers, they very often may simply give up and sign off their problems unresolved.
For the diagnosis of device failures, a remote failure diagnosis service has recently appeared. When this service is used, a diagnosis of the failure of a manufacturing device, such as an automatic lathe, or of OA equipment, such as a facsimile machine or a copier, employed by a user, is made at a remotely located service center, and a quick, troubleshooting process is performed. More specifically, a history of malfunction alerts or of the operation of a user's machine is stored in a service center file, and when a major problem occurs, a call is immediately initiated so that an error status report can be transmitted to the service center via telephone line.
If the machines involved are expensive and are shipped only in limited numbers, as are manufacturing machines such as automatic lathes, the individual machines can be separately connected to a service center. However, if apparatuses or operations to be used for connections to service centers are provided for all units in a group of mass produced apparatuses, such as electric home appliances, the increase in manufacturing costs will be too great, and the operation will also be extremely complicated. Furthermore, the current remote failure diagnosis service for OA equipment is maintained only at a level at which problems are diagnosed without user input being required. In other words, this service does not take into account the remote control of a terminal device and the transmission of operating instructions to a user.
Recently, “Jini” has been developed as a Java technique for the interconnection of different apparatuses, such as personal computers, AV apparatuses and electric home appliances, via a network. This software employs a distributed object technique that is being developed by Sun Microsystems, Corp., and is constituted by software that provides a function whereby objects can exchange messages using asynchronous communication procedures. “Jini” is being developed for use for establishing connections via a network consisting of various types of apparatuses having different processing speeds. However, “Jini” merely provides a method whereby apparatuses interconnected via a network can select themselves using Java code that is mounted, so that the apparatuses can mutually employ each other. A method whereby a server can control individual apparatuses is not taught in Jini. Thus, in order to simplify an explanation for an operation performed at a remote area and to easily exercise the remote control of a device, the problem of how to apply many techniques must be resolved.